I actually didn’t like that feeling of being out of touch because what I do depends on being in touch. But it’s fun to talk about. That’s one of the real dangers of drugs: they’re too much fun to talk about.
Like most people who smoked umpteen cigarettes a day, I tasted only the first one. The succeeding umpteen minus one were a compulsive ritual which had no greater savour than the fumes of burning money.
A luxury liner is really just a bad play surrounded by water.
As far as talent goes, Marilyn Monroe was so minimally gifted as to be almost unemployable, and anyone who holds to the opinion that she was a great natural comic identifies himself immediately as a dunce.
A traditional fixture at Wimbledon is the way the BBC TV commentary box fills up with British players eliminated in the early rounds.
The essence of a class system is not that the privileged are conscious of their privileges, but that the deprived are conscious of their deprivations.
A sense of humour is common sense dancing.
I’m certainly not a linguist. I learned what languages I could learn in order to read books and I can’t really speak them. I couldn’t have stayed out of jail in most of them.
In London there was no home cooking worthy of the name. When you were in funds you ate out. But only the people whose faces appeared in such publications as Town and Queen could afford to eat in restaurants serving food which would leave them looking and feeling better instead of worse.
Dinner was meat – not hunks of meat, as in Australia, but pathetic scraps of meat, as in Britain – which the girls upstairs transformed into edible dishes by heating it in secret ways and adding bits of stuff to it.
I won’t have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I’m going: It’s like a row of restaurants in California.
I’ve only got a fraction of the energy I once had, but I think I probably use it better.
The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.
The key to effective teaching is to remember how you learned.
The smartest move I ever made in showbusiness was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as. I was already aged in the wood.
My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn’t really mean that I’m finished reading.
Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from ‘Star Wars’ played backwards through a washing machine.
The Canadian version of Julius Caesar’s memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
I’ve got life for a subject because as life starts to drain away, you start seeing very clearly what life is, for the first time.
Snooker is just chess with balls.